Visit the forum instructions to learn how to post to the forum, enable email notifications, subscribe to a category to receive emails when there are new discussions (like a mailing list), bookmark discussions and to see other tips to get the most out of our forum!

Working with Brianna, who is the go-to person to get current specs for parts that are needed to make CAD diagrams of parts for the GVCS machines like the CEB Press, I have learned that machinists prefer to work in pure, simple inches (like 70 inches) instead of feet-inches (70 inches = 5 feet, 10 inches). The text manufacturing instructions, then, are being written that way, and I feel it is important in making the documents accessible that dimensionals in the CAD diagrams should match this.

Google Sketchup (which has been used for all the CAD diagrams so far used in the documentation) seems to only use feet-inches, but you can replace its automatically generated text and I have done so to replace the feet-inches with pure inches. I do not know if there is a setting within Sketchup to auto-generate pure inches on the dimensionals. However, if you are working on the CAD diagrams for the wiki (which are also being used in the to-be-published-as-PDF word processing documentation), please endeavor to use pure inches instead of feet-inches in the dimensional text.

Why not use metric units? After all it is more common around the globe than feet and inches. Here is a worldmap displaying the last remaining non-metric nations in black (the colored ones indicate time when they adopted the metric system):

You can still provide the measurements in metric even when they convert into even imperial units. Of course, if you're going to edit the units you might as well provide them in both imperial and metric.